Kenneth Hammond is a Professor at New Mexico State University. He has taught there since receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in History and East Asian Languages in 1994. Hammond specializes in the history of China in the Early Modern period, especially the 16th century. He has published numerous articles on Chinese intellectual and political history, and his book Pepper Mountain: The Life, Death and Posthumous Career of Yang Jisheng, 1516-1555 came out in 2007. In 1999, Hammond was a Research Fellow at the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and in 2002-2003 he was a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. From 2007 to 2015, he was Co-Director of the Confucius Institute at New Mexico State. Since 2017, he has been affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Hammond has been a lecturer for the National Geographic Society and for the Smithsonian Institution in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Hammond’s principal current research project is Cities, Markets, Maps, a study of urban transformation in early modern China and its visual representation in maps and other images.
